The invention relates to an improvement of a multi-path interrupter device, comprising a housing which is constituted by two assembled parts and accommodates a plurality of contact means for acting as an interrupter, distributed along a circle and joined to a part of the housing, and a manual control member comprising in a single piece made of resilient material:
a control lever, whose pin emerges from the housing through an opening of its upper part, while the other end of the lever is supported by a central pivot carried by the lower part of the housing, which control lever can be inclined in different directions from a central rest position,
resilient return means in the form of parts intergrally formed with the control member which parts are elastically deformable and are arranged so that they bear on abutment means carried by the housing, the return means biasing the control lever to the central rest position, and
a peripheral crown arranged so that the crown acts on at least one of the contact means when the control lever is manually inclined.
Such a device is known from European Pat. No. 0024813 (corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 4,349,708) for use as a manual controller associated with an electronic video game, by which controller the user gives orders to the electronic game, for example, for displacing objects or images of persons displayed on a cathode screen. In the known device, the control member can be displaced in eight different directions from a central position which is at right angles to the major surface of the housing. When this member is pushed in one of these directions, a peripheral crown forming part of the same control member is tilted so that a point of the periphery exerts a pressure on one of the four electrical interrupters arranged along a concentric circle having the same diameter as the peripheral crown.
The resilient return means of the control member, for biasing the control member to the central rest position, is constituted in part by the peripheral crown itself, which is made deformable by arcuate recesses, only four points of connection of the peripheral crown to the control member being left. For another part the resilient return means are further constituted by a supplementary piece in the form of a glove finger which is wound onto the pin of the control lever and is connected to the housing by a deformable bellow, this piece being made of a flexible elastomer.
The known device has the disadvantage that an angle of inclination of the control lever as large as is desired in practice cannot be obtained and that a comparatively large force is required to actuate it. This is especially due to the fact that the major part of the return forces is supplied by the deformable peripheral crown which also ensures that the pressure is exerted on the interrupters and is not or substantially not capable of independently controlling these two forces (the return force and pressure force on the interrupters).
Otherwise, the known device utilizes four interrupters, which permits of obtaining a control in eight directions, because two consecutive interrupters can also be actuated simultaneously. According to given applications, it may be desirable to increase the number of interrupters, which, in view of the construction of the known device, may lead to insurmountable difficulties.